Introducing the Arnold Palmer Martini, for Golf — and Always

If we've learned one thing from TurBacon and deep-fried Oreos (and let's be honest, we've learned a lot of things from deep-fried Oreos), it's that some of the best ideas in food and drink don't always come from professional chefs.

Take the Arnold Palmer Martini, my new go-to summer tipple and the brainchild of amateur mixologist and friend of Eat Like A Man Matt Hughes. It is delicious, refreshing, and knocks you on your ass.

Hughes wasn't the first person to wonder what happens when you get (the) Arnold Palmer smashed. A quick Google reveals evidence of a (very) boozy take on the legends's classic country-club beverage dubbed the "John Daly," in which the standard lemonade-and-iced-tea combo is spiked with a shot of vodka and renamed for America's favorite rough-and-tumble golfer.

Hughes's homemade formula, however, does one better: It dispenses with all the extraneous water in the equation by infusing the vodka directly with black tea, then adding lemon juice and simple syrup. Don't let the vodka-infusion thing scare you off. If you've ever put a cigarette out in your G&T and discovered a tobacco-tinged, murky mess the next morning, you're already a pro at infusion.

Of course, every great invention has a creation story. From Hughes himself:

"I was playing around with homemade infused vodkas (tea, rosemary, lemon, pepper, etc.) last summer. It started out as a shot of tea vodka in lemonade and quickly became the opposite (a shot of lemonade in tea vodka), and by lunch I thought, this works."

Nice.

If the Arnold Palmer Martini was going to live up to its namesake, we felt it was our journalistic duty to sample it under as many circumstances as possible, tinkering as we went along. We're happy to report that the APM succeeds on many levels:

• Instant nostalgia for childhood trips to the club swimming pool, now with mellow buzz.